Planning holiday campaigns

Planning your holiday fundraising campaign early is a useful way to maximise the potential to reach your target audience. Whilst social media campaigns don’t have to exceed your marketing budget, but they do require some time to plan. Social media offers cost-effective channels to leverage emotive storytelling through a variety of different content formats to drive your charity’s message and gain a wide reach.

Here are some of our tips when planning a social media campaign.

Making sure the graphic design elements of your campaign align with your branding.

Charity fatigue is prevalent during the Christmas season, so it’s important to differentiate your design whilst making it iconic to your brand and the campaign’s messages. Before you begin to type ‘graphic design trends 2017’ into your Google browser, it’s important keep in mind the goal is to design strong graphics that will allow your business to remain unique, whilst standing out from the crowd.

Before jumping to plugging holiday symbols like trees or gift boxes, or even adopt design trends like ‘minimalism’ or ‘negative space’ into your campaign design, it might be useful to first consider some of the following tips:

–Align the campaign’s colour palette and stylistic elements with your charity’s brand, which is tailored to your logo and mission.

–Study previous campaigns of competitors to make sure your design is distinct and unique.

–Ask for feedback at various stages during the design process.

Otherwise, if you find yourself with little time to spend re-drafting and refining your graphics material, CrowdSkills can connect your business with affordable and localgraphics design talent to help your charity achieve its goals, with the convenience of meeting in person.

Micro-influencers are an affordable and effective way to reach your target audience.

Don’t have the marketing budget for a social media influencer with thousands of followers?

As a nonprofit, your priority is likely to generate meaningful leads and long term donating relationships. What better way to reach your target audience than to use ‘micro-influencers’ to promote your cause, that is, people who still hold authentic influence within their networks although on a smaller and more intimate scale.

How do I find the right micro-influencers?

Identifying micro-influencers in your existing network of social media followers, donors, or current employees is an effective method of finding individuals passionate about your cause, who are already inclined to partner with you for intrinsic rather than extrinsic incentives.

Something else to consider before contacting a potential micro-influencer is their engagement with their audiences. Candidates that post regularly with more likes, comments, and shares are likely to have greater presence within and influence over their networks in addition to higher levels of engagement.

Tailor your content to the affordances of the social media platform used to engage audiences.

Facebook: Entice your audience using storytelling and video content to generate meaningful engagement. Due to recent algorithm changes on Facebook, organic reach of business posts has decreased from “over 20% to roughly 2%,” saysThriveHive. This means it’s increasingly important to create personalised and rich content that encourages sharing and likes, and this includes taking advantage of 360 and live video features.

Additionally, 2017 changes in Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm means that posts with links to low-quality websites will be demoted, and defined as containing “little substantive content, and that is covered in disruptive, shocking or malicious ads”. This again places emphasis on the pressure to create engaging and high quality content via blog or video formats. Quality video content however, doesn’t have to be time-consuming, difficult or expensive. CrowdSkills can connect you with affordable and talented videographer freelancers with a wide set of digital skills.

LinkedIn: Aim to share rich content daily during the business week, whether that be blog posts, thought leadership articles, industry articles, or news updates. This provides a great way to begin positioning your Christmas campaign in follower’s minds in the months leading up to its launch. Include rich visuals like images, which lead to a 98% higher comment rate, whilst links to YouTube videos that autoplay on the platform’s feed produce a 75% higher share rate according to LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. Want to read more about LinkedIn best practices?Click here

Twitter: Twitter is a network for conversation and community-building. Creating personalised experiences by engaging your followers in conversation is vital to this platform as it works favorably with Twitter’s algorithm. “As your followers start to engage with your Tweets more often, Twitter will pick up on the pattern and be more likely to prioritise your Tweets for those users,” saysSproutSocial.

Whilst GIFS, images, and video content increases audience engagement, tweeting a link to your latest content does not have to be a one-time activity. Since organic reach of business posts have decreased over time, tweeting your content various times over a month’s period is essential to maximise reach.

Go for it!

So that’s it. Thinking strategically about graphics design, micro-influencers, and social media affordances are just some of the variables to consider when planning your social media campaign this holiday season. As social media algorithms constantly change, businesses are inevitably required to stay up-to-date and accordingly shift their approaches to marketing strategy in order to remain competitive.

If you would like to know more about the services we offer at CrowdSkills, whether that be graphic design, videography, websites, social media, marketing or app creation, you can find us here and receive a quote today.